From the first use of the phrase, “labor saving device”, by advertisers to the present day, labor … good, hard, honest labor, is seen as a last resort, and those who engage in it, as uneducated undocumented aliens, who, for some reason, are a drain on our society.
By Alessandra Profumo
With the recent death of Jessie Lopez de la Cruz, one of the first female workers in the United Farm Workers Movement, the Labor Movement lost one of the unsung heroes whose shoes may be impossible to fill.
Like Rosa Parks, who became a key figure in the Civil Rights Movement, both women were thrust into the limelight through a circumstance of fate, rather than conscious intention. Rosa Parks sat down at her rightful spot on the bus because of her deep conviction for what was fair and because she was just too tired to do otherwise. Jessie Lopez de la Cruz came into prominence in the Farm Workers movement because Cesar Chavez, while holding a meeting at her house, asked her to come out of her kitchen and join them.
Jessie came out and was never the same. She took up the good fight in her forties, organized, marched, boycotted, and testified against the use of the now outlawed, short-handled hoe. She became not only a proud union organizer, but a delegate to the Democratic National Convention as well, and served on the executive board of the California Rural Legal Assistance. She never stopped fighting for workers’ rights, she never stopped working.
When I was a young mother, I met Jessie at a fundraiser I had been invited to at a friend’s house. I was one of the few non-Spanish speakers in the room and I was trying to find out if it was okay that I had brought my nursing infant son to the gathering. Jessie heard me attempt to ask in my very, very broken Spanish and answered that of course it was okay and it was good I was teaching him about justice at such a young age. Jessie was not the main speaker that evening and it was not until years later that I learned who this warm and encouraging woman was, but I was left inspired by her words and stunned by her humility.
The shoes of Jessie and Rosa Parks will be hard to fill because they seem to be out of fashion as our current culture is anti labor. I can point to the obvious union busting tactics of Governor Scott Walker in Wisconsin or Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago as apparent examples as far as organized labor, or point to the general negative press that unions garner, but there is a deeper, darker force at work.
From the first use of the phrase, “labor saving device”, by advertisers to the present day, labor … good, hard, honest labor, is seen as a last resort, and those who engage in it, as uneducated undocumented aliens, who, for some reason, are a drain on our society. Never mind that they bus and wash our restaurant dishes, care for our well manicured yards, raise our children, clean our houses, and oh yes, bring our crops to our tables, labor, and those who do it for us are a necessity that should be neither seen nor heard.
There is no honor in “dirty” work and no dignity afforded those who live by it. While the new, higher, minimum wage in California just signed into law by Governor Jerry Brown, may make a bit of a dent in the poverty red line for legally hired workers, undocumented workers will still be used and exploited, perhaps even more so as the profit line may take a little dent itself. In a country that says it values an honest day’s wages, hard work, and pulling oneself up by one’s boot straps, why then do we so detest labor and are so parsimonious towards those who perform it? Perhaps these maxims are nothing more than sentimental phrases to be embroidered on pillows. They are the myths that go into telling the American story, true for some, but not for others.
Why is it assumed that to give our children a better life, we envision a life without hard labor? Labor is necessary and honorable and should be carried out in a dignified and healthy environment. Dirty jobs should be more than reality television; those who take those jobs on should be honored for the important role they play in all our lives, not gawked at for entertainment’s sake.
Jesse Lopez de la Cruz has died, but hopefully, the ideals she fought for are still alive somewhere in all of us. I hope that she was prophetic in her statement to me, not just for my own children, but for the next generation. I hope we all learn that labor is not only necessary, but honorable. This can only be achieved however, when we compensate those who perform that labor with dignified wages and working conditions that are just.
